OKOKOK I HAVE. thoughts. about the movie
I went to see Iron Lung yesterday and- ok first some mostly spoiler-free stuff.
The movie was a good horror movie. There were some small issues, but, as horror, it was impeccable. First horror movie to actually unnerve me and stress me out in yeaaaaaaars. It was claustrophobic and barren and tense and unsettling. It didn't rely on cheap jumpscares to scare the viewer. It was good. There was blood. There was so so much blood. It respected the shit out of the game. It understood eldritch horror. The cinematography was beautiful and clever. The majority of what happens early in the movie has a payoff later on, which is fun.
Some of the dialogue/audio balancing was a bit off though, so some lore-important bits might get lost. Still, being a bit confused is normal and a part of the experience, I think.
OK now for some spoiler bits that I need to get out there.
First off: the radiation bit REALLY got to me. I knew it was X-Rays bc I watched playthroughs of the game, so every time he used the camera I had this Ivycomb song lyric in my head ("~microwave-baked radiation~" or something) and kept imagining the various symptoms of acute radiation poisoning. The latter part is probably what messed me up the most about the entire movie, actually haha.
Second: the hallucinations, or what my friend and I dubbed the "Fuckass Guy". That was gooooooood. Really creepy, and showed how much all of Everything was affecting Simon. Lack of oxygen, isolation, fear, claustrophobia and radiation were really screwing him over, to the point where he was seeing things that shouldn't be there.
There was an odd bit of symmetry with the Fuckass Guy that I hope was intentional. You see the Other Person In The Empty Submarine three times total, with the middle time being when Simon's under the floor. The symmetry occurs with the other two parts. The first time, he's sitting down in the chair iirc (I might be misremembering, I was kinda Freaked at the time lmao) and slowly turns around to reveal a person standing there, looking at him right in front of the camera button. The Fuckass Guy then hides behind the side/towards the computer terminal. (He then grabs the fire extinguisher as a weapon to defend himself, but surprise surprise, no one's there.)
The second time, he's right at the computer terminal, and slowly checks the pilot's seat, where a Fuckass Guy is sitting. Fuckass Guy then slowly turns to look at him (and his face is uh. yeah.) and then Simon hides behind the side-wall, grabs the scissors as a weapon to defend himself. (When he goes back around, surprise surprise, no one's there.)
Weird that it happens twice in almost the same way, right??? Anyway, so that was really neat.
Third: Chekhov's Gun. Almost everything ends up having a payoff. Almost.
The life vest: Simon pulls out the vest, looks at it, and you can practically see him thinking, "how is this going to be useful, I'm in an ocean of BLOOD and I'm way too deep for a LIFE VEST to be of any use..." So uh. That ends up being used two other times: once as a light when he restarts the engine, and once as the MOST IMPORTANT ITEM in the entire sub. He uses it to save the black box.
The tape: the tape is super super shitty. It doesn't stick well. The sub is also dripping with condensation (when Simon said it wasn't condensation, my first thought was blood plasma, but iirc plasma's a bit yellower), which means that when he tries to tape the camera button so he can use the light without clicking it constantly, it falls pretty quickly. This too gets used two other times, sort of: the first time is when he gets stuck in the cave, and he uses several layers of the stuff to get the button to stick, and it keeps un-sticking and falling to the ground. And then it's with the veins/arteries that grow over the camera button in the same X pattern Simon made with the tape. (which. btw. while the tape use was clever, RIP. Turbocancer time.)
The fire extinguisher: so when Simon sees the FUCKASS GUY that first time, he grabs the fire extinguisher, which is a good way to show the viewer that it's there for when he uses it later when the engines actually catch on fire.
Hull breaches and sparks: When Simon gets pulled back up to the surface right before the second descent, Eva asks if there's any hull breaches, and if there's any sparks or fire or anything weird. Simon says no. This then gets called back a few times in quick succession when the sub gets thrown into the caves and the engines break. There's sparks underneath, which tells Simon there is an underneath he needs to deal with. He goes down, reboots the engines, and then that causes a reinitialisation of the systems and opens the porthole cover (which is also mentioned twice before as NEEDING to be closed, once on the first descent and once on the second). Then the automated systems start repeating HULL BREACH. HULL BREACH. This then becomes important bc Simon, terrified, lonely, guilt-ridden Simon eventually gets angry at the hull breach message and punches the speaker real heckin hard, damaging the hardware.
The instruction manual: Simon sees the instruction manual when he goes down the first time, looks through it real quick, and dismisses it out of hand. He can figure it out. He doesn't need instructions. Later on, he finds a message in a bottle written on a piece of scrap paper. All the ingredients are in place. Simon uses the manual twice after this: once to hold the sub's "move forward" control for a very long time, and then he realises that the message was written on a piece of the instruction manual, allowing him to reboot the engines. Him actually looking through the manual gives us a glimpse of the camera instructions, which tell us that Eva lied about the X-Rays not affecting the interior of the ship. The text said something about "compound use of the camera". I couldn't read fast enough to get more, but I think we know the gist of it haha.
X-Rays and Cancer Speedrun: Simon figures out the camera is there and Useful pretty early on. When he explores to the spot he's told to explore, he takes a photo, and... skeleton! Except people who saw the game (and people who paid attention when he took that photo of the hangar) know that the camera uses X-Rays... and so the photo ignores flesh. It only sees harder materials, like bone. Which means... maybe it was never a skeleton in the first place. And so when he goes to find the skeleton, it's not all that surprising that it isn't there anymore. (What's more surprising is that Simon finds its head, and ONLY its head, a bit later, which means either it WAS a skeleton and something beheaded it... or it wasn't, and whatever beheaded it was much stronger and much bigger.) (Oh also turbo cancer gets mentioned when Eva and the welder get irradiated, and then it turns out Simon has acute radiation poisoning near the end too. He's a dead man walking.)
RAM IT: The ramming device gets installed between the first and second dive. Simon is instructed to ram the skeleton to bring a sample back. The ship holds. This comes back later when he rams the Creature and breaks its face to give himself enough time to get the black box out.
The Black Box: This one gets shown when Simon restarts the engine. He goes through the whole crawlspace. It's long and claustrophobic. It takes a long time. Tension is high (mostly because of the Fuckass Guy). So you KNOW that when the sub is filling with blood, and there's a Giant Monster waiting to break the vehicle like a tin can in a crusher, going down to fetch that Black Box is going to be... uh.... a bit rough haha.
SM8: When he falls in the cave for the first time, Simon finds another sub. He's been asking if anyone else went down here frequently (Eva lies about this, and Simon finds that necklace and message hidden in the sub, so he already knows she's lying) and now he found another submarine where someone, yk, died. He downloads the other sub's pictures, goes "not my problem", and leaves. Except... it becomes his problem. Not his monkey, but definitely his circus. It's the only way he has to get the others to pull him out- he has data they need. Except he didn't have admin permissions, and only pulled photos. They want the rest of the data. So he has to go back.
"If you see them out there... tell them Simon's still alive": When Simon falls in the caves, he sees the big monster, and talks at it, telling it to just ignore him, telling it that he's getting out. Telling it his name. And then later, when the "other sub" person talks to him, it uses his name. "I never told you my name," Simon tells the person through the speaker. "You did," the voice answers. He didn't tell the people on the surface. He didn't tell the "other sub". But he did tell the monster.
"A god looking through a pinhole": the whole movie, Simon can only see outside of his sub through pinholes, through inherently limited means of seeing the world. He can see through the tiny porthole that Eva repeatedly wipes clean, but that keeps being covered in blood again (mmm symbolism). He can see through the camera, which takes one image at a time, and only sees in X-Ray vision. He can see through the proximity detector on his console. Very limited. And then he sees the light, and the monster describes the whole thing as god's light shining through a pinhole. Simon never understood what was happening. He never understood the monster. He always had a limited understanding of it, and of the general situation. We always had a limited understanding of it.
"And then I'm free": Every time Simon gets a mission, he says he'll do this one thing and, as per the deal that was made, he gets to walk free despite being part of the group that blew up one of the last space stations supporting human life in the universe. The first time, Eva half-lies. And then we'll see kinda deal. The second time, he's dropped in, and no one answers, since he just irradiated Eva and the welder. The third time, though... he leaves to get the black box, and she finally answers, "And then you're free." Only for the monster to grab Eva's sub when it's time for Simon to leave, and for Simon to realise what has been true the whole time: he was never going to live.
I don't know if there are other moments that have a payoff like this, but those are the ones I could think of!
A few other things I liked:
Simon's crimes and guilt being shown repeatedly as being Real Heckin Bad. He's killed a BUNCH of people before, presumably to create soil for Eden's garden. He was part of a group that blew up a space station. We uncover this in bits and pieces. People in the intercom ask about it frequently (including the monster). Whether or not he deserves to be there is also a frequent question the movie asks, and I think it decides that no, he doesn't deserve this. No one does. But someone has to do it, because there's no other hope left.
Hope. There is so much hope in this movie. It keeps getting crushed over and over again, but Simon always, always keeps his hope. Hope is a seed from a dead tree. Hope is a light flickering next to a speaker. Hope is a black box with vital information. Hope is it happened once, it can happen again. Hope is what's more likely, that all the stars and planets vanished, or that a few space stations vanished? Hope is a life vest. Hope is bigger than one person. Hope is passing on the torch again and again and again. Hope is choosing to live even with the inevitability of death. We will all die, each and every one of us, yet we fight to live. We keep hope.
EIGHTY THOUSAND GALLONS OF BLOOD
Eldritch/lovecraftian horror done well! We still don't know what the hell happened. We still don't understand the monster. We barely saw the monster at all, honestly- we saw bits and pieces, nothing more. We saw the monster from the front (and mostly with X-Rays, so it's inherently inaccurate to normal human sight), and we saw that one shot where Simon's tripping balls and sees the monster ripping and tearing through the ship. That's it. We hear its voice, but the voice is not its own, the voice is stolen. The blood is alive, and it grows flesh, and what the hell is going onnnnnn. Very good. Also the inherent horror of everything vanishing all at once.